Incarcerated
by portoftheartistasayoungc
Summary: Paige is in California, plagued with nightmares and guilt, when she finds out that Emily has been arrested in conjunction with Mona's murder. This is her reaction to the news. Canon up to 5x23.


_Paige dropped her head. Her hands were on her knees, her whole body hunched over as she gasped, searching for a breath that wasn't coming. She was so tired, but she had to keep going._

_With one last haggard pull of her lungs, she lifted her head again. The other girl was still running. She showed no signs of tiring or stopping. _

"_Em! Wait! Emily!" Paige called out, her eyes trained on the purple spandex of Emily's tank top. "Please, I need to rest!" Paige shouted as the other girl finally slowed to a stop and turned around begrudgingly, hands on her hips. She cut a menacing figure against the trees. _

_Paige knew where they were. It was the woods surrounding her house. The scene was familiar to her for some reason. As Emily sauntered back towards her a sick feeling settled deep in Paige's stomach. She couldn't remember how they'd gotten there, why they were running. But the feeling of déjà vu was so strong that it actually tasted like bile in Paige's mouth. _

"_You never should have kissed me, Paige. I was drunk!" Emily yelled, glaring at Paige, who was fighting with everything she had not to throw up on the dirt of the path beneath her feet. "You knew I was drunk and you took advantage of me!"_

"_Emily, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry…I couldn't help…" Paige started to make an excuse for her actions, but reeled her words back in. "You're right." She conceded. _

"_And now, you're calling me back? Asking me to wait? I can't believe you would do this to me. I thought…I thought you loved me, Paige."_

"_I do! Emily, I love you so much, I—" _

_But that sour taste had finally won. Saliva coated the inside of her mouth for a moment before the contents of Paige's stomach spilled all over the ground and she couldn't do anything but wait. Wait for emptiness._

"_I'm going to go," Emily said coldly somewhere above where Paige was now on her hands and knees, her limbs shaking from exhaustion. "I think you need some space."_

Paige jolted awake. She was sitting in bed, her right hand thrown out in front of her, reaching for the girl that was haunting her dreams but was never there when she woke up. Her hand curled into a fist when her brain finally caught up with reality. She slammed her hand down on the mattress next to her, the sting of her old transgression fresh once more from the dream she had just had. She tried not to think about that night Emily had showed up on her porch drunk and, it had turned out, drugged and kissed Paige. It was too painful. She hated herself for letting it happen.

Paige glanced across the room. A pair of wide, concerned eyes were staring back at her. Of course her roommate was still awake, Paige thought bitterly. The only thing that could make her constant, debilitating nightmares worse was that she almost always had an audience.

"You okay?" Ellen asked softly. Paige felt bad for the girl, really. No one wanted a crazy roommate. And she knew that's definitely how she had come across for the past month and half.

"Yeah," Paige replied, attempting to brush off what had just happened. She took a deep breath that caught somewhere in her chest before she could force it the rest of the way out. "Just a dream."

"You're crying," Ellen said, moving across the room from where she'd been perched on her bed to offer Paige a box of tissues.

Paige moved her fingers up to her face. Her cheeks were wet. She hadn't even noticed in the wake of the nightmare that still clung to the edges of her mind. She accepted the tissues from her roommate, who still looked concerned and slightly wary. Then she dried her face off before offering Ellen a weak smile that she hoped looked more sincere than it felt.

"Those are some wicked nightmares you have," Ellen said, most likely trying to make the situation less awkward for both of them by simply addressing the elephant in the room. "Something happen to you…or?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Paige rasped, a hollow chuckle tripping out of her mouth. "Sorry if it bothers you. I don't really know…how to stop them."

"Don't worry about it," Ellen replied kindly, picking up the novel she'd been reading before Paige had interrupted her and turning her attention to it again.

Leaving. Going to California. It was supposed to help. Paige was supposed to be able to just _live_. To be a normal teenager for a couple of years before it was too late. But the fight was far from over, Paige had discovered. Stanford was beautiful, sunny, refreshing. The air seemed lighter and cleaner there than it ever had in Pennsylvania. But it couldn't wash away all the things that had happened to her. The deaths and the threats and –A were a part of her. She might not have been sneaking around, tailing Alison DiLaurentis anymore, in an attempt to protect her girlfriend from the manipulative blonde. She may no longer have a need to keep mace clutched in her palm, hidden inside her jacket pocket, as she walked home at night, every shadow sending her heart racing. And no, not a single dead rodent had fallen out of the locker her coach had assigned her when she got to Stanford. All that physical fight was absent. But it had turned inward, now; her mind riddled with guilt and anxiety. Just because she wasn't in Rosewood anymore didn't mean that she ever stopped worrying about Emily. Love wasn't a switch, after all, that you could flick off as you exited a room.

When the dreams had started, the second night in her dorm, Paige had not been prepared. A horrible, deep sadness permeated her entire being when she woke up from that first one, more consuming than anything she had ever felt. After a week, the circles under her eyes looked like dug out graves. She knew she had to do _something. _She had to be able to sleep. Paige thought that cutting Emily off, telling the other girl she needed space would help, somehow. It had to. She didn't know what else to try, short of flying back to Rosewood. Wrong again. Now, instead of a crying Emily, the woman she loved screamed at her in anger every time Paige fell asleep. The dreams were never the same, but their themes were consistent – Emily out of reach, bringing up events from the past that haunted Paige and shaming her for abandoning her now. Every time Paige closed her eyes Emily poured Paige's old guilt over her like kerosene and lit her on fire with her the pain of the present, throwing her own words back in her face.

It was torture.

_How?_ Paige asked herself every day as her arms and legs pushed and pulled her body through the water. _How could I have left her? How could I have left Emily Fields? _She should have known she'd never be able to escape her guilt when Emily and swimming were so intertwined in Paige's mind. . Each time she dove into the pool she was reminded of every time they had ever been in the pool together and the smell of chlorine brought back so many stolen locker room kisses that left them both breathless and hungry for more.

Eventually, Ellen turned off her bedside lamp and settled in to sleep. It was only about a quarter of an hour before Paige noticed that her roommate's breathing had turned to a slow, even rhythm indicating she had fallen asleep.

Paige did what she always did after one of her nightmares: refused to let that image of Emily replace the girl that Paige knew and loved. Instead of letting herself wallow even more in her guilt, she replayed her favorite memories of Emily over and over in her mind like a worn videotape. Singing karaoke together at that seedy bar outside of town. Emily kissing her so sweetly on the window seat in her bedroom. The way she tilted Paige's head up before she kissed her beside the pool that perfect night. The way she looked, sweatshirt hanging off one shoulder when she had told Paige she loved her the first time. The way her breath hitched as she chanted Paige's name like a prayer the first time Paige had gone down on her.

And when she got to the end, Paige simply started again, replaying each scene until she was completely inundated with black hair and brown skin and she could almost smell that sweet coconut shampoo Emily used after swim practice.

When she woke up the next morning, Paige felt groggy and exhausted still. She couldn't have gotten more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep. She rubbed her eyes and rolled out of bed, every muscle in her body protesting, heading for the shower.

Ellen was already awake, but the two didn't usually talk much in the morning. It was a bit of an unwritten rule between them, as Ellen was well aware of Paige's sleeping trouble.

This morning, however, Ellen cleared her throat, catching Paige's attention. Her roommate had a sort of grimace on her face and the two held each other's gaze for a few second before Ellen spoke.

"You said you're from Pennsylvania, right?"

"Yeah…"

"Rosewood?"

"Yes," Paige stated, now fully focused on her roommate, all thoughts of sleep gone.

"Look, I don't mean to pry, but I got on CNN's website this morning like I always do, and…"

"What?!" Paige demanded, her heart beating frantically.

"That girl," Ellen said, gesturing to the photo of Emily that Paige kept on her bedside table. "She's been arrested in conjunction with some big murder trial. Alison DiLaurentis was found guilty of murder," Ellen said, glancing down at the screen of her laptop. "And Emily Fields, she and two other girls were arrested as her accomplices and accessories to the crime."

"What? No, that's…that's not possible," Paige said, though she wasn't really talking _to _Ellen anymore. "Emily was with me that day and her parents. It was…she had nothing to do with…with Mona's murder." Paige let out a laugh that sounded more like a strangled cry of pain. "You're not reading it right…you've just…you're wrong!"

Paige lurched forward and grabbed the computer away from her roommate, who seemed too shocked to be upset by the action, turning the screen around so she could read the article for herself. She read slowly through the story. Alison's kidnapping had been proven false. It had all been a lie, a story that she'd told. And the others- Aria and Spencer and Hanna and…Emily. They had been in on it. Mona had known, too, had threatened to expose Alison's lie. And that was Alison's motive for killing her, to keep her quiet. The other girls had helped. There was evidence. The cops had been building a case against them. That's what CNN was reporting anyway. There were even pictures of Emily, Spencer, and Aria just outside of the courtroom, being ushered into police cars in handcuffs. Hanna, apparently, was already in jail.

Paige felt like the floor had slipped away. She wasn't standing on anything anymore. The next thing Paige knew, she wasn't holding the laptop, though she couldn't remember putting it down. It also seemed that at some point she had dropped down onto her knees. Her hands were shaking. She hadn't been keeping up with the trial. In conjunction with her attempts to somehow live a bearable life at Stanford she had decided to distance herself from all things Rosewood, asking her parents to just not tell her what was going on with Mona's murder or Alison's trial. After Spencer's name had been cleared, well, she just didn't think that she or any of the others could be dragged back into it. But now. Now Emily was in prison. Paige had to go.

"I have to go," she said, her last forming into actual words. Paige blinked rapidly as she turned away from Ellen, who had been shaking her shoulder, trying to rouse her from the stupor she'd fallen into.

"Go where?" Ellen asked, not sure what was happening at all.

"Tell the coach I'm sorry," Paige mumbled to Ellen, who was also on the swim team. "I have to go home."

Paige stood up, her legs just as shaky as her hands, and walked weakly over to her closet. She pulled out her duffel bag and began packing things at random. Her mind was clear across the country already, with Emily, reeling over how she could help get her released. Her heart, Paige knew, had never really left. Her heart, it appeared, was currently incarcerated.


End file.
